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Latest updates, now that it's spreading around official media outlets: a suspect is wanted, Vance Boelter. He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/14/democratic-lawmakers-minnesota-shot
A man masquerading as a police officer is shooting politicians in their homes. The why is debatable; the theories I see floating around have to do with these two Democrat's recent voting records, and breaking from Dem consensus to support the Republicans. I don't know if this is true, I didn't check their records -- I share only because it's what I heard.
The why is also, I think, insignificant. There are so many reasons to be violent in modern society, if you're not intrinsically against violence itself -- punishing defectors, rallying your side with a show of force, intimidating people and politicians on the margins. I don't care what specific social ill or rage drove this would-be assassin.
More interesting, to me, is that we're seeing assassinations and their attempts more and more. It seems that way to me, at least -- I'm going off vibes and a gut reckoning with the numbers, not a reasoned analysis. Maybe I'm entirely wrong! But the vibe I get is the willingness to use violence on one's enemies is becoming significantly more normalized by the day, and eventually, I suspect, we're going to hit a turning point where no one pretends they don't want the other side dead and we get to it.
I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.
It makes me think. We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.
We don't build. We don't conquer. We prosper, sort of, the numbers on the charts go up and the useless shit is really cheap -- but the precious things are rarer than ever.
I dunno. Nobody died this time, I guess that's nice. And the future, rough beast that it is, continues to slouch toward Bethlehem.
edit: scratch that two died, I guess that's less nice. RIP.
I think honestly we talk about politics as identity and warfare, in ways that paint the other as an enemy, talk about the stakes as if they’re of earthshaking importance. And on top of that, everything is political, or if not by nature political, it will be used as a vehicle for political messaging.
This creates a supersaturated solution of political angst. Theres all this pent up emotion about things people are told are super important, that their enemies are working to destroy. Honestly, expect this to get much much worse because people are encouraged to see their problems in political light with those guys over there are making your life worse.
Near term, I think we need to actually disengage. Consume less news, stop following political opinion-makers and listening to political commentary. Go get a real hobby or three. Find a non political group of people — and in a space that explicitly doesn’t allow political commentary or discussion. If we go back to that, I think we’ll muddle through with a minimum of actual deaths. If everyone leans in and gets more engaged and more attached to causes, you can expect more shooting.
I genuinely think the source for this strife is that people are self sorting too much. People naturally tend to moderate when exposed to other perspectives. It’s just the exposure is too skewed towards social media and online/TV personalities and too little towards everyday fellow humans. Also why travel as a source for eliminating prejudice has reversed - too little actual genuine interpersonal contact. People will never learn how to talk about politics without rage unless they attempt it (and occasionally fail). It’s not much different than other social skills in that way.
I mean yes, I totally agree. But I notice that really the first bump of hyper-partisan politics seems to have started with the rise of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle. Before that, being a political junkie was hard work. You got an hour a day (local half hour and National half hour) of television news, a newspaper in the morning, and that was about it. Political talk radio was in its infancy, as was internet news. So if you wanted to closely follow politics, you’d have to buy in-depth news magazines and that had a time and money cost to it. Which made becoming too radical on either side of the equation a lot of work. You just couldn’t marinate in the stuff going on in Congress or what this or that political figure said.
I find, for myself, the more news I consume, the more political opinions mattered to me. Up to a point, awareness is good, and to the degree that an issue is actually important, you should be aware of it. But when news consumes you, you end up being pushed into radical thinking and anger and all the rest of it. It’s not a healthy way to live life. And I think slowing down and just doing much less thinking about politics is good for not just individuals but society in general. Most of the stuff people get mad about wouldn’t have made the news at all in 1982. What would you have heard about No Kings had it happened in 1982? You’d see a three minute story, maybe some random person saying something about “Trump isn’t a King”. You’d see another story about the military parades, maybe a couple of short “it’s good for the soldiers” statements by the brass, a brief clip of Trump clapping along to music or something. That would be it, on to other things. Maybe Iran and Israel get two minutes, as does Ukraine, and the shootings and manhunt in Minnesota. Weather and Sports. Not enough to feed on or radicalize on.
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Awareness might inflame the tensions, to the extent you can't fight an enemy if you don't know he's there, but I don't believe the problems are people being "told" anything. The problems are genuine and irreconcilable differences in terminal values and mutually alien axioms. Once, those differences didn't exist or weren't known, so we muddled along, but there's shared knowledge now. We do, in fact, know what our fellows think, what they want, and what they vote for.
The Fruit of Knowledge has been eaten. We cannot now lose our awareness of good and evil.
I don’t think my point is to be “unaware”. My point is to turn down your level of exposure to the toxoplasma of outrage — and just as import, if you want some degree of normalcy— make it a social norm in your non-political spaces that we do not talk about politics here in places where the purpose of the group or activity is not political.
I don’t think our differences are completely irreconcilable. If you talk about big picture end goals, most people want the same things. Prosperity, health, safety, relative freedom, and an educated populace. If you gave that list of goals to anyone from communists to libertarians, from old school democrats to NRx bros, I think they’d all agree on those things as end goals. We actually have two problems: too much political news, and too many people who have made politics their personality. Neither of those have anything to do with solving the problems that exist in policy. In fact they prevent solutions as everyone is convinced the other guys are evil. And that thus compromise is evil. And here we are.
Of course if you reduce life to its broadest and least specific terms, we all want Good Things and don't want Bad Things. The problem is that there's no such thing as prosperity, or health, or safety, or relative freedom, or an educated populace. These aren't objective measures, they're vibes and negotiations, and the negotiations have been breaking down for decades.
Is it healthy or unhealthy to support trans rights?
Is it safe or unsafe to tolerate drugged-out homeless on the streets and public transit?
Can our nation be prosperous without disarming its citizens? Can it be safe?
You can't balance civilization on platitudes.
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The question that befalls those that are cursed with this knowledge is then, what to do about it?
Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?
Separation. Erode federal power, establish common knowledge that federal power should not be enforced or respected. That's the best possible use of power, and even that is Russian roulette.
On an individual level, allow the Sort to run its course, cooperate with it if possible. If you live in the wrong place, move. That's just common sense.
This was apparently blue-on-blue though. Can't avoid that by sorting, unless the sort becomes fractal.
Was it? Not all democrats, especially in Minnesota, are blue tribers(although that is changing). This could easily have been blue on red-tribe blue dog.
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Whether it was blue-on-blue remains to be seen, but blue-on-blue is much, much easier to deal with than red/blue.
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